View full sizeChe Dechaune Marks ... convicted and sentenced to life for rape.

MOBILE, Alabama – A convicted rapist who got a second shot at freedom when an appeals court found judicial error at his trial is back where he started – serving life in prison without a possibility of parole.

After five days of testimony and argument last week, a Mobile County Circuit Court jury took less than a half-hour Friday to find Che Duchaune Marks guilty of first-degree rape. Mobile County Circuit Judge Sarah Stewart immediately re-imposed the life prison sentence.

“It was very difficult to find the victims. The crime was in 2009,” Assistant District Attorney Nicki Patterson said. “We were asking the three women to relive something that happened to them four years ago.”

Defense attorney James Vollmer said the trial played out in a similar way to the original proceedings in February 2011.

“All of the same evidence came in,” he said. “It was a difficult five days.”

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the original conviction and ordered a new trial after determining that Stewart erred in her instruction to jurors that they could consider similar allegations by other women if it might help them determine the defendant’s “motive, opportunity, plan, knowledge and identity.” That, the court ruled in a 4-1 decision, was too broad since the defendant’s identity was not in doubt.

Ultimately, the judge allowed the same testimony but gave a different instruction. Two other women testified that Marks, 39, attacked them within eight weeks of the main victim.

According to testimony, that victim – 15 years at the time – reached Marks after dialing a wrong number. The defendant, according to testimony, convinced the girl that she knew him and would recognize him when they met. When they did, he raped her at gunpoint in a vacant Toulminville apartment, according to testimony.

Authorities never charged Marks with raping the other two women, one of whom lived in his mother’s apartment building and the other who was a friend of the defendant’s sister. Patterson said she would file charges in those cases if something goes awry with last week’s conviction when it goes back before the appeals court.

The severe punishment results from the defendant’s extensive criminal record, which includes three other Class A felony convictions.